Istwa Nou

The debt began with loans taken in the 1960s and 1970s for projects that never paid, and compounded when governments borrowed again to service what they already owed. Export prices fell, terms of trade worsened, and states lost the revenue to run themselves. Africa's total debt went from 9 billion dollars in 1970 to 321 billion by 1997, and interest on unpaid arrears took a growing share of national output that would otherwise have gone to schools and clinics. Western aid averaging 12 billion dollars a year through the 1990s was a stopgap, and it gave the donors an unprecedented voice in the internal policy of sovereign countries. The money came with conditions attached: liberalise, privatise, cut state spending on health and education. The campaign to cancel the debt was the newest in a line of public causes that began with the movement to abolish the slave trade, and like the missionary appeals of the nineteenth century it treated the continent as a condition to be corrected.

Sub-Saharan African economies grew by an average of 2.4 percent a year between 1980 and 2000, then by 5.7 percent across the decade that followed. Six of the ten fastest growing economies on earth were African: Angola, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Chad, Mozambique and Rwanda. The money came from Chinese, Indian, Gulf, European and North American investment, from the privatisations that structural adjustment demanded, and above all from Chinese appetite for raw materials. Growth on that scale reached very few people. Poverty stayed general, schooling stayed a privilege, healthcare stayed out of reach, and access to capital continued to depend on which family a person was born into, with women worst placed. A middle class is visible in the cities and remains a minority. The proceeds went to roughly the same sort of operators who took them in the nineteenth century, the political, military and commercial adventurers positioned to collect. Selling raw materials at good prices was the engine then as well. What happens to the proceeds is the entire question.